Ann Cavlovic is joining us today to talk about her novel, Count on Me. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan’s meddling in their parents’ lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money.
What’s Ann’s favorite bit?
In a novel dealing with tough family dynamics and elder abuse, my favourite bits of Count on Me are the rays of hope – specifically, the moments in which the protagonist gradually learns how to enjoy her young daughter. Tia learns, over the course of the novel, that breaking a cycle doesn’t mean swinging to the opposite extreme. And that means seeing her daughter as more than just a creature she must protect at all costs.
Here’s one of those bits, in which Tia is cozied up with her toddler in a fort made from couch pillows and blankets:
“How I loved the feeling of being contained with my child in a hide-away, off limits. Yes indeed, Zoe, we are inside. This is your fort and I am your guest. No one else can come in right now. Through my daughter, I held a passport to the land of happy childhoods. And so I could see wisps of ghosts in the corners, spirits who suddenly panicked, as if my statement of safety was to them an invective. They fled through gaps between pillows, wiggling smoky tails behind them. Why had I let them linger for so long? It was so much quieter now, without their persistent low-level trilling.”
Speaking of swinging between extremes, in two paragraphs you might think I’ve gone from the dreadfulness of elder abuse to the cutesy poo of parenting. And here too, the novel (like nature) doesn’t really operate with clear binaries. On both fronts, the reality is a messy middle, and as early feminists said: “the personal is political.” For instance, consider that Tia picks a daycare for Zoe that:
“…followed the Reggio approach, a philosophy of early childhood education that started in Italy in the wake of the Second World War, when a group of parents asked themselves, amid the devastation, how to raise children so that fascism could never again take hold.”
I appreciate being asked this question about my favourite bit, and I imagine like most authors, it’s quite hard to settle on just one answer. Most of us swing wildly (aha.. a theme!) between thinking every sentence is pure poetry to thinking they’re all garbage. In between there is, here too, a very vast and diverse middle.
I was mostly in the “all garbage” camp just before my editor reached out to start on my manuscript. Through the editing process, she helped me improve the novel and fall back in love with it. Part of that involved helping me see the parts in which I needed to adjust the volume on how I depicted parenting: turn down slightly the ‘honesty’ about the tougher extremes, and turn up the positivity and redemption shown through the next generation. This was a gift to me, and to the reader, and I appreciate her doing this.
LINKS:
Website
BIO:
Ann Cavlovic’s fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Canadian literary magazines and news media such as Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, PRISM international, The Globe & Mail, and CBC. She lives in Western Quebec. www.anncavlovic.com